Thoughts of an eighth grade math teacher

Monthly Archives: September 2013

The first month of school is now winding to a close. I survived and my classes are running well. But due to exhaustion, my new little blog got ignored. Thanks to MS Sunday Fundays for motivating me to post again. It helps to have a topic. This week’s topic is Favorite Resources. So here are a few of my old standbys and also some new resources I’ve recently discovered.

I love this book and am using it right now with my 8th grade students. Students begin by actually building patterns with toothpicks and tiles. From there they learn about slope and y-intercepts and how those are represented in a graph, equation, table, and picture. Amazing resource! I also recently discovered http://www.visualpatterns.org and am excited to extend my exploring patterns unit with more patterns from this website.

I follow my unit from The Pattern and Function Connection with lessons from this book. Now that students have seen what slope and y-intercept look like and are familiar with them, this book has some excellent real-life applications of them.

There’s already a lot of buzz in the MTBOS about this amazing resource, but if you haven’t yet heard of it, you should stop reading my blog right now and go check it out. Absolutely amazing. I’ve used two lessons already (iLine and Not So Fast). They were fabulous and I can’t wait to try out some more.

Is it weird to include an RSS Reader as one of my favorite teaching resources? Lately, my best teaching ideas and resources have come from the math blogs that I read. I won’t go into all of the blogs I read – I’ll save that for some other post. But I will mention the benefits of using an RSS Reader because without out one, there is no way I could read as many blogs as I do in the limited time I have. Since my beloved Google Reader kicked the bucket in July, I have adopted Feedly as my RSS Reader of choice. The benefit of using an RSS Reader is that it lets you know when your favorite bloggers have new posts and it collects them into a single place. So instead of having to go out to individual sites, the posts are pulled into your reader. If you don’t have one, you really should try it out. Your life will never be the same.

Free and safe text messaging for teachers. Students never see your phone number, you never see theirs. I love that as I’m driving down the street and I realize that I forgot to tell my students something, I can pull over and send them a text. They get the text/email and so do their parents. It’s fabulous.

I just recently learned about this one and haven’t had time to play with it much. But it’s on my to-do list. I’m introducing graphing calculators next week in class and will probably spend some time in the lab introducing Desmos the following week.